What's the difference between reaction and response?

With the former you are dead, with the latter you are alive

It was not until I walked face to face with Albert Low (Montreal Zen Center) that I left the cushion and learned to sit in everyday situations without reaction, responding but not reacting. There is a difference, a great difference.

I hurt, who did it? is the way we react to unpleasant situations and people. The world is rubbing me the wrong way, so I react to remove the cause of the pain. This is the OS of the Sense of Separate Self, formerly known as Ego. This is a reactive way of being in the world.

When we respond to the hurt or irritant (which can escalate to hurt) we are creative. We transmute the pain into a greater way or a wide-angle way of knowing, instead of the narrow minds that we are conditioned to use. To respond to a situation is to go against the Stream, where reaction is normal and expected. We even feel guilty if we don't react, don't push back.

Zen is the long and hard practice of alchemy, where you transmute the pain of creation into the joy of responding. When we react, we know what we are going to do because reaction comes from the habit mind, from our karma. Our reaction is predictable to us and to others.

But Response is not predictable because it is creative, and creative means you are creating your consciousness in a way you have never done before. Even you will be surprised by a creative response. Your creative response is empty of memory or form.

This is what Zen means: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form reacts to form. Form is form. Emptiness is absent of old names and forms; Emptiness is the response to form that creates new form, unknowable forms that are no longer known as yesterday's behavior.